


Missive

by sendal



Category: Emergency!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:24:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sendal/pseuds/sendal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Character death, but I hope it's affirmative . . .</p>
    </blockquote>





	Missive

**Author's Note:**

> Character death, but I hope it's affirmative . . .

Mud. In his ears, under his tongue, behind his eyelids. John Gage scrubbed long and hard to get the gritty, clammy feel off him, and as he showered he thought about the triple punch of mud slide, gas explosion and fallen telephone pole that had nearly killed him and his partner that afternoon. He remembered Captain Stanley hammering at the wall, the inexorable climb of mud around his hips and waist, Roy's pallid face in the gloom. Not every day did they nearly get buried alive. Distorted, suffocating images of collapsing walls followed him into sleep that night, and when he woke sometime in the early morning he saw the bed across from him was empty.

Johnny followed the smell of coffee across the firehouse and toward the kitchen. Through the window in the swinging door he could see Roy sitting at the table in his T-shirt and turnout pants, writing a letter by the light of a small lamp.

"Hey," he said as he pushed the door open and headed for the refrigerator. "Whatcha doing?"

Roy didn't look up. "Nothing."

Johnny pulled out some chocolate milk. "Nothing at three a.m.?"

"Yup."

Curiosity engaged, Johnny sat on the edge of the table and tried to read upside-down. "Who you writing a letter to?"

Roy's gaze narrowed. "My congressman."

"Really?"

"No."

"Oh." Johnny gulped out of the carton. "Couldn't sleep?"

"Chet's snoring again."

"We should get a clothespin and snap it onto his nose," Johnny said, although he suspected Roy's early-morning wakefulness had less to do with noise in the dorm than noise in his own head - the crash of wood, perhaps, or the gurgling, sucking sound of water and dirt flooding down the hillside. "Some rescue today, huh?"

Roy twisted the pen in his hands. "Could have been worse."

"I suppose." Johnny could, in fact, think of several ways in which it could have been worse. He could readily imagine mud rising to his chest, his chin, his lips. Swallowing mouthful after mouthful of it, feeling his lungs clog up and shut down - no, thank you. He decided he didn't want any more chocolate milk, either. He put the carton away and asked, "Staying up?"

A faint glitter of amusement in Roy's eyes. "That okay with you?"

"Sure." Johnny wasn't about to drag his partner back to bed and tuck him in like a child. Everyone had his own way of dealing with bad days. Captain Stanley liked to listen to jazz before going to bed. Mike preferred a game of poker. Chet pulled practical jokes. If Roy wanted to write letters, that was his business. Maybe Johnny could sneak a peek at them later. "See you at breakfast."

When the station alarm went off a few hours later, Roy was already back in bed and sound asleep. Johnny forgot about the letters until a month or so later, when his growling stomach woke him at midnight and he again found Roy writing while the rest of the station slept. The letters became nothing more than another fact he knew about his partner, like how Roy stacked his hamburgers with the condiments on the bottom and the burger on the top, or how he read books no one else at the station had ever heard of, or how he often liked going out for beer with the guys more than he liked going home to his wife and kids.

A twenty-four hour shift could fly by in an instant or drag on for what seemed like weeks, but looking back, Johnny could always remember the timelessness of any given day - the certainty he would be young and strong forever, that fires and emergency calls would always set his pulse racing, that Los Angeles in the 1970's was as fine a place to live as any. Yet things were always changing. Hank Stanley retired with a bum knee. Kelly Brackett and Dixie McCall married and moved to Florida. Roy finally took a promotion to engineer, and Johnny followed two years later. They saw each other on occasional weekends or at important family events, like Chris DeSoto's high school graduation or Johnny's wedding.

Time, sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy, always in motion. Lifting the heart, wearing down joints, speeding up the days while slowing down stamina and strength. Old friends dead, new grandchildren born. Marriages dissolving, fading away. The years, so fast. And one day, early in summer, John Gage saw his reflection in a bathroom mirror and had to blink twice at his own wrinkles, old age spots and snowy white hair. He washed his hands with cold water and walked down the hall to a hospital room where windows overlooked a lush green lawn.

"He's sleeping," Chris said. Little Chris, a grandfather now. Impossible. "There's not much time left."

Johnny put his hand on Chris's shoulder and squeezed.

Chris pulled something out of a bag. "He wanted you to have these. Said he should have given them to you years ago. Mom got hers when the doctors found the first lump. Michelle got hers when she got married."

He looked at the bundle in his hands. Dozens and dozens of envelopes, yellowed with age, all with his name on them. After Chris left, Johnny sat in the bedside chair and opened one up at random.

 __

 __

 _19 May 1973_

 _  
_Johnny,_ _

Today we got called out to treat a kid who stuck a bean up his nose. You were really good with him - made him laugh even though his mother was practically in hysterics. You made a puppet out of a glove and two tongue depressors and entertained him all the way to Rampart. You don't think you'll ever get married but I bet you will, and you'll be a great dad. Just don't let them stick beans up their noses.

Roy

Johnny smiled, but he didn't remember the run. So many thousands of patients they had treated. He looked at his partner, so still and unmoving beneath the oxygen mask, and opened the next envelope.

 __

 _12 December 1974_

 _Johnny,_

 _You almost got yourself killed today. Cap's so mad he's got steam coming out of his nose. You nearly gave him a heart attack when you ran back into that house to save the old man. There's risks, Johnny, and then there's risk with a capital R. Capdoesn't think you know the difference and Chet says you just want to be a hero, but I know you just can't stand being useless in the face of impending tragedy. Later you said I would have done the same thing, but I don't know. Maybe I'm not as brave._

 _Roy_

"But you were," Johnny protested. He let the letter fall on the hospital blanket. He could remember plenty of times when it had been Roy who waded through the flames in search of a victim, Roy who plunged back into smoke and soot to save a life. The man in front of him was long past being able to scale a ladder or knock down a fire. The nurses and orderlies saw only infirmity, illness, weakness. But in Johnny's memory, Roy was still tall and strong, with hands gentle enough treat a child's scrapes or strong enough to force a heart back into motion.

The letters had no order to them. Some were just a paragraph long, some two or three pages. Johnny read some silently and some aloud as the afternoon light shifted and the hospital routine whirled around them. Each neatly folded piece of paper was a time machine, taking him back to Station 51's kitchen. He imagined Roy sitting up during the long nights and jotting down the messages in his square, neat handwriting. Each was a chronicle of encouragement or doubt, fondness or sadness, fear or occasional triumph. Only a few had been written after Roy's promotion to engineer. One had been written the night before he accepted the move.

 __

 __

Johnny,

 _I can't go forward and I can't go back. These have been the best years of my life but I don't have anything left to give to the broken and bleeding. I'm not strong enough to keep trying. If I'm never sentimental enough to tell you out loud, now now that you're a great paramedic and firefighter. I owe you my life._

 _Roy_

The words blurred. Johnny dragged a hand across his eyes. "That goes both ways, pal," he said. His career in the L.A. County Fire Department would have ended tragically early if Roy hadn't been there to haul him out of infernos. Any scorecard would have markings in both columns, solid black checkmarks of risks taken and battles won. They had cheated death for decades.

Until today. Johnny touched Roy's forehead and waited for watery blue eyes to open and focus. Nothing. The instrument monitors were too far for Johnny to read without his glasses, and his ears heard only a soft whoosh - his own blood in his veins, perhaps, or the sound of a river rejoining the sea. Maybe he was hearing the sound of freeway traffic rushing behind Station 51 as it had on so many of the days and nights of their youth.

Outside the window, the sun burned against the horizon. One last letter remained for Johnny to read. He opened it with a jagged thumbnail. Something about a mud slide. He couldn't remember. But as he settled back into the chair, one hand resting on Roy's arm, Johnny felt the missive take him back in time to a gleaming kitchen in the middle of the night. In the vision, everyone is sleeping but Roy, who sits at the table with paper in front of him, and Johnny, who has woken up thirsty.

"Drink all the orange juice and Marco will make you sorry," Roy says.

Johnny puts the bottle back and rummages for something to munch on - an apple or some cheese or maybe leftover birthday cake from B-shift. "You sure do keep in touch with a lot of people."

Roy looks down at the envelope on the table. "Not so many."

"Who you writing to now? Old army buddies? College girlfriends?"

A small smile. "You'd be surprised."

Johnny tries to peek but Roy covers up the letter with one hand. "Fine," Johnny says as he perches on the counter. "I don't mind, as long as you're not writing about me."

"Don't worry so much," Roy tells him. "It's only the truth."

Johnny scowls. He trusts his partner, but he wouldn't mind getting a peek at just what thoughts or news are so noteworthy Roy foregoes sleep for them. One day, perhaps . . . sometime in the future, which to young Johnny Gage stretches forever and ever, like a Montana field on a summer day.

"Hey, Roy," he says.

"Yeah?"

"That was some rescue today, wasn't it? You did real good with that patient."

Roy gives Johnny a steady, affectionate look. "We both did good."

Comforting words. True words. They were the last words old John Gage heard. By the time the nurses came, he had followed them and his partner out of the dark and warm past to another place, where fire engines never got rusty and firemen never grew old. The yellowed letters spread across the bed were saved by Chris DeSoto, who donated all but one to the Los Angeles Firefighters' Museum.

 __

 _Dear Johnny,_

 _Today we nearly got buried alive by a mud slide and collapsed house. I held on to the patient while you and Marco worked out an escape route. Let me tell you, the sound of splintering wood and running water never made me so scared in all my life. But the John Gage luck held out, and we got out without a scratch. Here's my advice, Johnny - don't ever lose that lucky rabbit's foot or whatever it is that you have. Let's never grow old. Let's never die._

 _Your partner,  
Roy_


End file.
